BB: The Two Titos: Josip Broz's Visual and Discursive Representations in Africa

This presentation compares Josip Broz Tito’s visual and discursive representations during his trips to Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s. Yugoslavia’s president was followed by dual and often contradicting symbolic capital. Built up discursively as the epitome of a freedom fighter and an ally of all freedom-loving nations worldwide, Tito often looked the part of a quintessential European colonizer during his visits to Africa. This lecture brings together the two aspects of Tito’s diplomatic presence and success in Africa during the early days of the Cold War.

Dr. Filip Mitricevic is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington. His dissertation, titled "The World Champion of Antifascism: Yugoslavia’s Multidirectional Legitimacy Discourse in the Early Cold War (1948-1961)” and supervised by Prof. Maria Bucur-Deckard, investigated the Yugoslav communist regime’s memory diplomacy in the Global South during the 1950s. Positing that the regime’s inward and outward-facing legitimacy discourses were heavily interdependent, the dissertation explores the dawn of Non-Alignment through the process of synonymizing Yugoslav antifascist legacy with the Global South’s anticolonial struggle.   

Since 2019, Filip has been involved in teaching and research at Indiana University. His teaching assignments included classes on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the First World War, survey classes of European history, and the history of baseball. His work was supported by various funds of the Mellon Foundation, John W. Hill Endowment, IU’s Russian and East-European Institute, and OeAD’s Ernst Mach Fellowship.